CIO New Zealand launches the inaugural CIO50, recognising the nation's top 50 technology and digital chiefs of 2019. Business executives gathered at the Hilton in Auckland to celebrate their achievements (Photos by Jason Creaghan)

It is important for the CIO to become the ‘trusted advisor’ in the organisation, says Gerard Naish, head of ICT at Ports of Auckland. “Ideally, this means rather than finding ways to bypass IT, people instead beat a path to your door.”

Transpower is working on several projects that harness AI and related technologies. One of these is the deployment of the robots Wall-E and Evie to provide real-time situational awareness of their remote sites.

“Whenever you deliver IT projects or enhancements to a business, you are delivering a change. You should never lose focus on who is impacted by this change and how the change affects them,” says Mark Leadbetter of House of Travel.

“We now have a stronger focus on digital and data to ensure we ensure we transform into a data-driven, digital healthcare system,” says Shayne Tong, chief digital officer at Auckland District Health Board.

Spark has made the transition to Agile @scale, an unprecedented business model of this scale in New Zealand. Where previously technology people all sat at desks on one area, now they are spread throughout several different tribes and squads, explains Mark Beder, whose role combines both the CIO and CTO functions at Spark

“People and partnerships matter,” says Andrew Goodin, who has worked for over 10 years at Zespri, including CIO and acting chief digital officer. “It is very difficult to create something of value alone.”

“We have created the Via Innovation model to encourage designers of smart tech to partner with the health board,” says Stella Ward, chief digital officer at Canterbury and West Coast District Health Board

Figured was built on the idea of connecting farmers and their advisors on a common cloud financial platform to enable better collaboration across each member of the farming team, says its chief technology officer Richard Wyke.

Xtracta has enhanced its data identification, capture and interpretation capability of legal documents such as contracts, says Jonathan Spence, CEO and CIO of Xtracta. Through the company’s machine learning capability, the software learns from interactions with the customer’s users and in doing so, it continues to fine-tune its interpretive and understanding abilities of legal documents he says.

For the past two years, ACC has been delivering transformational business change that puts our customers at the heart of what we do, says Paul Jepson, CIO of ACC. “This transformation programme is all about improving our customers’ outcomes and experience. To do this, and to deliver better customer service, requires an integrated approach across our people, processes, technology and information."

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